Table Of ContentI'll Never Be Young Again
DAPHNE DU MAURIER
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
Table of Contents
VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 515
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PART ONE: - JAKE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART TWO: - HESTA
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Teaser chapter
The Glass-Blowers
Mary Anne
VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 515
Daphne du Maurier
DAPHNE DU MAURIER (1907-89) was born in London, the daughter of the
famous actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and granddaughter of George du
Maurier, the author and artist. A voracious reader, she was from an early age
fascinated by imaginary worlds and even created a male alter ego for herself.
Educated at home with her sisters and later in Paris, she began writing short
stories and articles in 1928, and in 1931 her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was
published. A biography of her father and three other novels followed, but it was
the novel Rebecca that launched her into the literary stratosphere and made her
one of the most popular authors of her day. In 1932, du Maurier married Major
Frederick Browning, with whom she had three children.
Besides novels, du Maurier published short stories, plays and biographies.
Many of her bestselling novels became award-winning films, and in 1969 du
Maurier was herself awarded a DBE. She lived most of her life in Cornwall, the
setting for many of her books, and when she died in 1989, Margaret Forster
wrote in tribute: ‘No other popular writer has so triumphantly defied
classification . . . She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and
yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of “real literature”, something very
few novelists ever do’.
By the same author
Fiction
The Loving Spirit
I’ll Never Be Young Again
Julius
Jamaica Inn
Rebecca
Frenchman’s Creek
The King’s General
The Parasites
My Cousin Rachel
The Birds and other stories
Mary Anne
The Scapegoat
Castle Dor
The Glass Blowers
The Flight of the Falcon
The House on the Strand
Rule Britannia
The Rendezvous and other stories
Non-fiction
Gerald: A Portrait
The Du Mauriers
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë
Golden Lads
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall
Myself When Young
The Rebecca Notebook
I'll Never Be Young Again
DAPHNE DU MAURIER
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
Published by Hachette Digital 2010
Copyright © The Estate of Daphne du Maurier 1932
Introduction copyright © Elaine Dundy 2005
All rights reserved.
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is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 0 7481 1459 7
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Introduction to this Edition
Devotees of Daphne du Maurier will find in I’ll Never Be Young Again a rich
source of self-revelatory material.This second novel with its world-weary title
was completed in 1930, when the author was all of twenty-three years old.
Young as she was, however, it is all there, yet at the same time none of it is. She
is a beginner. Nevertheless, it contains the strengths that will make her one of the
great monologists in twentieth-century fiction, most endearing are the twists,
turns and shocks of her plots, which are done in such a way that the reader grows
to accept them as reasonable. It also reminds us again what a strong influence
James Joyce had on our writers in the 1920s and ’30s, with his stream of
consciousness, a technique du Maurier uses to her great advantage.
Two decades later, about her novel in progress, The Scapegoat, she will write
to her publisher Victor Gollancz describing her task as ‘simply to take a
fantastically impossible situation and make it read with utter conviction’, a target
which she hits bull’s-eye in most of her novels, including this second one.
In form the novel is episodic; if a film, it would be called a ‘road movie’, with
the self-described male narrator, Dick, driven from crisis to crisis. Starting as a
would-be suicide on a London bridge, he moves to a posh cruise of Scandinavia.
From there, as a deck hand, we find him on a run-down tug boat about to sink.
Having survived, he goes on to Paris. Settling into café life, he enters into a year-
long love affair with an American girl, simultaneously embarking on becoming a
writer, buoying himself up on hot dreams of fame and fortune. His bubble bursts
when a noted publisher tells him he has no talent. Then, when he returns to Paris,
his girlfriend walks out on him. In a surprise ending, he becomes happier than he
has ever been in his life as a bank clerk in London, listening to a bird who seems
to be singing over and over, ‘I’ll never be young again.’
True, Dick is rather unsympathetic. Du Maurier will rarely make that mistake
again. At the same time she will magically retain the weaknesses, dishonesties
and peccadilloes in her characters that are unsympathetic, as she does with Dick.
Fifty-seven years later, in her novel The House on the Strand, there is also a
narrator called Dick who is similarly unsympathetic. Coincidence?
Subconscious? Provocative?
This early novel is a forerunner of the later ones in that, as with all prolific
writers, du Maurier employs favourite words in it which she will use throughout
her work. It’s fun to see which words here will become staples of her style.
‘Fool’, ‘child’ and ‘brandy’ are three. Her characters feel like fools, as often as
they call other people the same. The word ‘child’ denotes everything from
innocence to tantrums while brandy is, universally, the only drink characters
swallow to pull themselves together. It is fascinating to see some phrases evolve:
‘I’ll never be young again’ progresses to the second Mrs de Winter’s ‘I’ll never
be a child again’. Biting one’s nails under stress, which appears as early as her
second novel, turns up again full force in the second Mrs de Winter, who says, ‘I
didn’t like it. I began biting my nails. No, I did not like it.’ Nail-biting will apply
throughout her oeuvre. In The King’s General, one person even gets around to
biting his hands. Daphne herself bit her nails when growing up. A touch of
reality.
Another reality in du Maurier’s books is that people die in them, sometimes in
profusion! She kills them off with the brio of Dickens and Shakespeare. Babies,
mothers and grandfathers fall dead just when we are becoming fond of them.
Only two people die in I’ll Never Be Young Again, but they are the two most
important to Dick. Reading her novels, we become alerted to the real and present
dangers that threaten her characters every time they mount a horse, climb a hill,
step into a car or carriage, scramble up a balcony - or even walk out of a front or
back door.
Important also are du Maurier’s unhappy endings (which her husband teased
her about). They leave us to ponder how invariably fate pays us back for our
transgressions. Though her books were advertised as ‘romances’, boy rarely gets
girl; in fact it is rare that two main characters go off together into the sunset. We
realize she feels it would be morally wrong if they did. Du Maurier, schooled in
the ways of the world, makes this sound sense, leaving a reverberation that
haunts us; whereas a happy ending would merely signal closure.
After reading Margaret Forster’s biography documenting du Maurier’s
hitherto unknown bisexuality, I confess that it sent me straight back to her novels
sleuthing for clues of this interesting facet of her personality. And there are
plenty. Nowhere is it more blatant and confusing than in I’ll Never Be Young
Again, when narrator Dick explodes about how he wished his father had treated
him like a boy: ‘I wanted to use my fists against the faces of boys,’ he says, ‘to
fight with them, laughing, sprawling on the ground, and then run with them,
